When Google said that HTTPS will be used as a ranking factor, nearly every one in the search engine industry scrambled to abaide the new Google ruling. Everyone I knew (in SEO) was finding ways to redirect HTTP to HTTPS. And Father, I have sins, as I too redirected my main sites from non SSL to SSL.

Before any changes was done, I was finding information from Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and a dozen more on ways to change my website from HTTP to HTTPS. By the look of it, it was a simple job which I forecast-ed to complete under 30 minutes.

Believe it or not, the whole process took me over 3 days and it wasn’t that easy either. I broke my website numerous times and I was at the brink of giving up. Thanks to my top notch web hosting company, they assisted me with the whole migration thing and at this time of writing, HTTPS is fully enabled on this site.

One of my Band Buzzers from Facebook (private group) hit me up on Facebook and asked if I could write a tutorial on changing HTTP to HTTPS. There is no way in hell I would say no!

Here are the things you’ll learn in this blog post:

• 1

  The differences between HTTP vs HTTPS

• 2

  What do you need to enable HTTPS on your website?

• 3

  How to redirect HTTP to HTTPS correctly

• 4

  Enabling HTTPs features with CloudFlare

• 5

  How to enable HTTPS with MaxCDN without breaking your website?

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Without delay, let’s get started changing your WordPress from HTTP to HTTPS under 60 minutes (I hope).

HTTP vs HTTPS – The real differences

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) would means the website is service contents to its readers (like you and me) on non secure channels. HTTPS on the other hand, provides slightly higher security features to ensure that website readers are getting the contents they are looking for.

As I have highlighted in this post on the importance of building business relationship, you are bound to lose website visitors if the website is constantly being hacked or prove to be a security concern.

The ‘S’ in HTTPS would mean secure and this represents the site is being encrypted to a certain degree.

As a blogger, it really doesn’t matter if you are using HTTP or HTTPS. As a matter of fact, HTTPS is commonly used on eCommerce sites where there are business processes such as transactions and personal details are involved.

One of the reasons why Google would want to implement HTTPS is because it is extremely vulnerable (especially on the Internet) for users when they are surfing the web without any secure channels. Simply by entering a password on a malicious website could lead to tons of problems down the road.

How to redirect HTTP to HTTPS on WordPress?

Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS on WordPress is really easy. Here’s a complete tutorial on how to start a blog from scratch.

The below are the exact steps you need to take to enable HTTPS on your WordPress website.

You would need to have (or buy):

• SSL certificate (buy affordable SSL certificates here)
• CloudFlare Pro (if you insist to use CloudFlare)

What is SSL certificate?

SSL Certificates are small data files that digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organisation’s details. When installed on a web server, it activates the padlock and the https protocol (over port 443) and allows secure connections from a web server to a browser.

With an SSL certificate, your site will look like this:

The standard and free CloudFlare account does not support SSL feature and therefore, you have to either upgrade to CloudFlare Pro or avoid using CloudFlare at all cost.

Directing all website traffic from HTTP to HTTPS

There are several ways to enable HTPS on your website which are through:

• WordPress settings
• .htaccess redirect 301
• Yoast SEO

With the 3 options, Yoast SEO is probably the easiest but at the same time, it doesn’t work on most websites (not sure why). Therefore, I would highly recommend you to use option 1 and 2 first instead of using solely on Yoast SEO.

Option 1: Enable HTTPS through WordPress dashboard

After purchasing SSL certificate, you need to redirect all website traffic to HTTPS. In order to do the redirection via WordPress settings, all you need to do is head over to Settings > General > Change all addresses to HTTPS

Option 2: Change HTTP to HTTPs using .htaccess

If you want to use this method, all you need to do are:

1. Login to cPanel (or via FTP)
2. Search for .htaccess file (you may need to enable ‘view all files’)
3. Copy the code below and paste into .htaccess for 301 redirection

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on

RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

Save the file and you should have all pages redirected to HTTPS.

Option 3: Enable HTTPS on websites using Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO also makes it easy convert to HTTPS by using the transport feature. Yoast SEO > Permalinks > Canonical URL

Please note that if this method does not work, you need to proceed either one of the the options above.

How to enable HTTPS on CloudFlare?

If you are planning to use CloudFlare with HTTPS, your only bet is to subscribe to CloudFlare Pro at $20 per month (single website).

The standard CloudFlare account does not support HTTP and therefore, your SSL cert will not work with it.

It is surprising that CloudFlare does not provide a decent tutorial in this but since I went through the hassle, here are the exact steps needed to get CloudFlare fully integrated with your SSL cert.

1. Subscribe to CloudFlare Pro account (you can register or change your plan here)
2. Contact CloudFlare support team to get your SSL certificate authorized and checked

In most cases, you could just purchase an SSL cert, turn on CloudFlare Pro features and your website should work perfectly. It would take between 24 hours to 48 hours to have CloudFlare fully integrated with your SSL cert.

You (and your website’s traffic) may face a couple of security alerts like the one below:

By rule, the error message would go off after 24 hours. In my case, I keep getting the same error and the only way to solve this is to contact CloudFlare support team using the two steps above.

How to enable HTTPS with MaxCDN without breaking your website?

MaxCDN is probably the most popular Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider in the world. It could speed up your website from over 3 seconds to under 1 second with just a blink of an eye.

Seriously, #MaxCDN is just good that in terms of improving #website loading speed.
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If you want to speed up your website, try MaxCDN today with iron-clad, 30-days money back guarantee here.

While there are a couple of guides out that say that integrate HTTPS with MaxCDN is easy, allow me to share my experience with you.

Integrating HTTPS with MaxCDN is hell. Period.

In order to change HTTP to HTTPS and making sure MaxCDN doesn’t break your website, you need to perform modifications to your template files.

There is only step needed but it is very lengthy.

You need to change all the ‘http://’ in the stylesheet to ‘//’ only.

To ease the process, you can use Notepad++ (with the help of search button to find and change them). Notepad++ is free to download here.

Purge MaxCDN cache once everything is done and you’re golden

My experience redirecting HTTP to HTTPS

It is a no brainer that changing HTTP to HTTPS is definitely a huge challenge. For a half-baked IT person like me, it is pretty much challenging but certainly doable.

If your hosting provider provides staging area like WP Engine does, then you are pretty much safe. Or else, I would recommend you to download the needed files onto your local computer and test them out first before uploading.

Also, you have to aware of the consequences using HTTPS. For example, loading speed for websites would be severely affected (especially for visitors with slow Internet connections) and this can slow down the site by over 3 times more.

While HTTPS is soon-to-be an important ranking factor in SEO, the process to redirect HTTP to HTTPS is really crumblesome and I personally hope the guide above, provides you with sufficient information for the change.

Have you change your website from HTTP to HTTPS? If yes, share with me your experience using the comment form below.

The post How To Redirect HTTP To HTTPS On WordPress? appeared first on Smart Internet Lifestyle.